Even Japan's Infamous Mafia Groups Are Helping With The Relief Effort

Even Japan’s infamous mafia groups are helping out with the
relief efforts and showing a strain of civic duty. Jake Adelstein
reports on why the police don’t want you to know about it. For
more coverage of Japan’s crisis.

The worst of times sometimes brings out the best in people, even
in Japan’s “losers” a.k.a. the Japanese mafia, the
yakuza.

Hours after the first shock waves hit, two of the largest crime
groups went into action, opening their offices to those stranded
in Tokyo, and shipping food, water, and blankets to the
devastated areas in two-ton trucks and whatever vehicles they
could get moving.

The day after the earthquake the Inagawa-kai (the third
largest organized crime group in Japan which was founded in 1948)
sent twenty-five four-ton trucks filled with paper diapers,
instant ramen, batteries, flashlights, drinks, and the essentials
of daily life to the Tohoku region.

An executive in Sumiyoshi-kai, the second-largest crime
group, even offered refuge to members of the foreign
community—something unheard of in a still slightly xenophobic
nation, especially amongst the right-wing yakuza.

The Yamaguchi-gumi, Japan’s largest crime group, under
the leadership of Tadashi Irie, has also opened its offices
across the country to the public and been sending truckloads of
supplies, but very quietly and without any fanfare.

The Inagawa-kai has been the most active because it has
strong roots in the areas hit. It has several "blocks" or
regional groups. Between midnight on March 12th and the early
morning of March 13th, the Inagawa-kai Tokyo block
carried 50 tons of supplies to Hitachinaka City Hall (Hitachinaka
City, Ibaraki Prefecture) and dropped them off, careful not to
mention their yakuza affiliation so that the donations weren't
rejected. This was the beginning of their humanitarian efforts.
Supplies included cup ramen, bean sprouts, paper diapers, tea and
drinking water. The drive from Tokyo took them twelve hours. They
went through back roads to get there. The Kanagawa Block of the
Inagawa-kai, has sent 70 trucks to the Ibaraki and
Fukushima areas to drop off supplies in areas with high
radiations levels. They didn't keep track of how many tons of
supplies they moved. The Inagawa-kai as a whole has
moved over 100 tons of supplies to the Tohoku region. They have
been going into radiated areas without any protection or
potassium iodide.

The Yamaguchi-gumi member I spoke with said simply,
"Please don't say any more than we are doing our best to help.
Right now, no one wants to be associated with us and we'd hate to
have our donations rejected out of hand."

To those not familiar with the yakuza, it may come as a shock to
hear of their philanthropy, but this is not the first time that
they have displayed a humanitarian impulse. In 1995, after the
Kobe earthquake, the Yamaguchi-gumi was one of the most
responsive forces on the ground, quickly getting supplies to the
affected areas and distributing them to the local people.
Admittedly, much of those supplies were paid with by money from
years of shaking down the people in the area, and they were
certainly not unaware of the public relations factor—but no one
can deny that they were helpful when people needed aid—as they
are this time as well.

It may seem puzzling that the yakuza, which are organized crime
groups, deriving their principal revenue streams from illegal
activities, such as collecting protection money, blackmail,
extortion, and fraud would have any civic nature at all. However,
in Japan since the post-war period they have always played a role
in keeping the peace. According to Robert Whiting’s Tokyo
Underworld and Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes, the US
government even bought the services of one infamous yakuza fixer,
Yoshio Kodama, to keep Japan from going communist and maintain
order. Kodama would later put up the funding to create the
Liberal Democrat Party of Japan that ruled the country for over
fifty years. When President Obama visited Japan last year, the
police contacted the heads of all Tokyo yakuza groups and asked
them to behave themselves and make sure there were no problems.

But let’s be clear, the yakuza are criminals, albeit with
self-imposed restraints, and in their way may actually keep
street crime (muggings, purse-snatching, theft) down. Many
Japanese still admire or tolerate them. In fact, a Nara Police
Prefectural police study found that amongst adults under 40, one
in ten felt that the yakuza should be allowed to exist or were “a
necessary evil.”

There is an unwritten agreement amongst the police and the yakuza
groups that is acceptable for them to perform volunteer
activities during a crisis but not to seek publicity for it.
Before the crisis the police were cracking down severely on the
yakuza and any activity placing them in a heroic light might make
the police look foolish. So they have been very quietly doing
their part. It is not that the yakuza are not PR savvy, as is
evidenced by their careful control and limited appearances in six
fan magazines (three monthly, three weekly) that write of their
exploits; it is that right now they care more about getting the
job done than getting credit for it. As one members said, “There
are no yakuza or katagi (ordinary citizens) or gaijin
(foreigners) in Japan right now. We are all Japanese. We all need
to help each other.”

A bit of background: Japan has 80,000 members belonging to these
criminal organizations, which the police label
shiteiboryokudan or literally “designated violent
groups”; membership is not illegal although the police regulate
their activities, much the way the SEC regulates Goldman Sachs.
Their income is largely derived from protection money, security
services, financial fraud, stock manipulations, gambling,
blackmail, prostitution, and loan sharking. They call themselves
“yakuza.” The word comes from a losing hand in traditional
Japanese gambling: 8 (ya) 9 (ku) 3(za) which adds up to 20, and
is a useless hand. Thus to be a yakuza is to be “a loser.” It’s a
self-effacing term. They yakuza don’t call themselves “violent
groups.” They exist out in the open; they have offices, business
cards, fan magazines. The three major groups, the

Yamaguchi-gumi (40,000 members), the
Sumiyoshi-kai (12,000) and the Inagawa-kai
(10,000) all insist they are chivalrous groups, like the Rotary
Club, that they are ninkyo-dantai.

Ninkyo(do), according to yakuza historical scholars is a
philosophy that values humanity, justice, and duty and that
forbids one from watching others suffer or be troubled without
doing anything about it. Believers of “the way” are expected to
put their own lives on the line and sacrifice themselves to help
the weak and the troubled. The yakuza often simplify it as “to
help the weak and fight the strong,” in theory. In practice, the
film director Itami Juzo, who was attacked by members of the
Yamaguchi-gumi Goto-gumi because of his films depicting them
harshly, said “the yakuza are all about exploiting the weak and
disadvantaged in society, and run away from anyone strong enough
to stand up to them and their exploitive extortion.” He was
primarily correct, I think. However, sometimes, like today in
Japan, they live up to their original values.

Of course, most yakuza are just tribal sociopaths who merely pay
lip service to the words. But in times like this every helping
hand is welcome, and maybe, maybe for a few weeks, both the
police and the yakuza can declare a peace treaty and work
together to save lives and ensure the safety of the people of
Japan. To some extent, the police have even given their tacit
support to the yakuza aid efforts. That’s the spirit of
ninkyodo. It’s also the spirit of many of the Japanese
people. It is why I have no doubts that Japan will weather this
crisis and come back stronger than ever.

Naoya Kaneko, the deceased Sumiyoshi-kai boss who was a friend
and a source, once said, “In times of crisis, you learn the
measure of a man.” To understand the real meaning of that you
have to understand how the generally male-dominated and sexist
yakuza define “a man.” The core of that is giri, a word
that can be translated many different ways but which I interpret
to mean: reciprocity. Today, the Japanese people and even the
yakuza are measuring up very well to that standard of behavior.

Jake Adelstein was a reporter for the Yomiuri Shinbun,
Japan’s largest newspaper, from 1993 to 2005. From 2006 to 2007
he was the chief investigator for a U.S. State
Department-sponsored study of human trafficking in Japan.
Considered one of the foremost experts on organized crime in
Japan, he works as a writer and consultant in Japan and the
United States. He is also the public relations director for the
Washington, D.C.-based Polaris Project Japan, which combats human
trafficking and the exploitation of women and children in the sex
trade. He is the author of
Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan(Vintange).